In this group of chapters, Esperanza—aided and abetted in some instances by her friends—gives way first of all to silliness. With other children, she stares at clouds and finds significant shapes in them. Later, with Nenny, Lucy, and Rachel, she again considers the clouds, an exercise that ends up in a silly session as the girls “play the dozens” on each other. Pals again later, they prance around in high heels—an escapade that Esperanza introduces with a silly once-upon-a-time story about little people with little feet. Then Esperanza makes such a foolish fuss—for days—about taking her lunch to school that her mother at last gives in. The silliness of “Chanclas” is almost anticlimactic, with Esperanza pouting in a folding chair while everyone else dances, because she has had to wear her school shoes to the party.
All of this silliness is part of early adolescence; no one can act—or feel—quite so childish as someone who is about to leave childhood. Here Esperanza almost revels in it, from her sly embedded rhyme about “Darius, who doesn’t like school, who is sometimes stupid and mostly a fool” (33) to her story about the “little feet” to her list of reasons why she should be allowed to take her lunch to school. At other times, being silly involves feeling tremendously miserable about how silly one knows one is being, and then (if one is a girl and crying is allowed) bursting into tears about it, which is sort of the frosting on the cake of silliness. But the silliness of these chapters contains the seeds of other kinds of things: spirituality, imagination, humility, and above all self-realization—the beginnings of growth out of childhood.
The business of looking at clouds is an example. Very young children can learn to look at these shifting shapes and see doggies, bunny rabbits, and the like; Darius sees God—and who knows what this may mean to Darius, but to Esperanza it is a wise vision. Why? Esperanza knows this cloud isn’t literally the creator of the universe, so she knows what Darius says is a metaphor of some kind, one of those metaphors that one feels to be right even when it seems to defy reason. (It is probably, to be technical, an instance of synecdoche, that is, the part substituted for the whole, a more mundane example of which might be Lucy’s dialectal introduction of herself earlier in the book: “Me, I’m Texas.”)
However much Esperanza has thought about God—and she says nothing more on the subject—she has learned in her Catholic schools that God is everywhere and invisible but can also be in one specific place and time, as in the consecrated host. She has learned that God can be incarnate, as in the human body of Christ. As a child and a poet, she knows in her bones the mythic truth that the gods have always manifested themselves in natural phenomena. She also knows in her heart, whether or not she has read William Blake’s poem “Auguries of Innocence,” that one of the gifts of childhood is to be able “To see a world in a grain of sand / And heaven in a wild flower, / Hold infinity in the palm of your hand / And eternity in an hour.” There are few grains of sand and scarcely any wild flowers in Esperanza’s neighborhood, but as she says, they make the best of what they have, including the necessary sky, and Esperanza’s romantic, poetic heart recognizes what Darius says as important and true.
Clouds, too, are personally important to Esperanza, probably because they are light, buoyant, airy. The image of a cloud floating free, evolving at its own whim, in plain sight but mysterious, is attractive to this girl who feels like a tethered balloon wishing for release. Esperanza has done some reading up on clouds, between Darius’s observation (when she describes some clouds as “the kind like pillows”) and her next opportunity for educating her sister and friends, who do not react well to her erudition, with Nenny mocking her by “naming” each individual cloud with the name of a person, and Lucy turning on Esperanza with a comment about her ugly face. Despite this, however, Esperanza’s identity now takes on a new dimension: She is the one who knows the names and reasons for things and uses her reading to bolster her older-sister authority and her maturing sense of who she is.
Esperanza matures in other directions as well in these chapters. Because “the canteen” sounds glamorous, she insists on taking her sandwich to school so she can eat there. But her mother’s note makes it fairly plain to the Sister Superior what’s going on, and Esperanza is defeated. She tries to justify her tears by implying she was insulted and/or intimidated, but neither of these explanations will stand up to much scrutiny. In fact, she feels foolish, and when she discovers that “the canteen” is “nothing special” and her sandwich cold and greasy, she has effectively learned an adult fact of life: You can’t always get what you want, but sometimes when you do get it, it isn’t what you wanted after all. Similarly, in “Chanclas,” Esperanza learns to put things in perspective, as her feet go back to normal size after having swelled, with her own concentration on them, completely out of proportion. And in “The Family of Little Feet,” all three girls come to a tacit understanding and agreement that they are not ready quite yet for the kinds of attention they attract when they dress like grown-up women.
But they are practicing, edging closer to the border of that country where to be a woman means being “beautiful”—attractive to men, with one’s walk hobbled and the shape of one’s legs and buttocks exaggerated by wearing high-heeled shoes. And Rachel’s encounter with the drunk is an uncomfortable foreshadowing of the disaster that awaits Esperanza. At the same time, however, Esperanza has noticed that her boy cousin at the baptism party, whom she apparently finds attractive, watches her appreciatively as she dances, even though she is not wearing sexy shoes.
